well right now i have no funding what so ever im trying to scrape together a
few machines. being from houston and going to a private institute there i
have had my ins and outs with higher education IT. i agree with what you are
saying and now it makes totally perfect sense. also in addition to off
siting the tapes from last week couldnt you take a drive out of your raid
array and store them in an off site location then reuse again for a back up
down the road?
On 7/7/08, Gerry Creager <gerry.creager at tamu.edu> wrote:
>> Jon Aquilina wrote:
>>> in my case where money isnt an issue wouldnt it be better for me to build
>> a raid backup array? i understand your reasoning. im still studying and
>> fairly new in the higher education of IT so when i start working ill keep
>> what you mentioned to heart. only problem is that where i am located in
>> europe things are more expensive here. another random idea why not create a
>> raided backup array backed up to tape? is it possible to do a tape back up
>> of data thata being written to disk instantly
>>>> It's absolutely possible to do a mirrored write to RAID spinning media and
> also to tape. In a perfect world, where I don't have budget constraints,
> that's how I'd achieve my third tier of backup. The real reason we bother
> with tiered storage and multiple copies, however, remains "disaster
> recovery". One theory says that simply having two copies in the data center
> is enough. Experience teaches that, for true disaster recovery, one needs a
> pretty recent off-site copy, that is unlikely to be disrupted by an event in
> one locale. I know of one company that mirrors disks over 100 miles from
> their r&d/corporate offices via multiple 10gigabit paths, with two feeds for
> power, a diesel generator, and a battery plant to keep things running. In
> their main site, they have disk and tape. Offsite, they have another disk
> copy. And last week's tapes.
>> In higher-education IT, one tends to have a lot of budget constraints.
> Funding agencies want accountability and don't seem to just give us hardware
> dollars for the asking, although it often seems that way when someone who's
> not seeking said funding, watches the process. Therefore, money IS a
> problem and we have to determine the best way to keep things going while
> optimizing expenses.
>> Different approaches don't mean we're disagreeing with you, however. MY
> primary backup is spinning (RAID) disk. I'd like to expand to LTO tape with
> robotics but my funding agencies have not yet seen the wisdom of this, and
> think my use of disk is just fine. Until we have a problem (and problems
> are almost guaranteed) and get in trouble for not having incorporated tape
> (or another, different, technology) in our backup plan, I don't expect to
> see funds for it. In fact, when we do get in trouble, I see us redirecting
> already allocated funds rather than getting new funds, to accomplish this.
> Just understand that redirecting funding for a new hardware implementation
> requires sponsor approval, and if they don't understand "Why?" it can get
> messy.
>> gerry
>> On Mon, Jul 7, 2008 at 5:05 AM, Steve Cousins <cousins at umit.maine.edu<mailto:
>>cousins at umit.maine.edu>> wrote:
>>>>>> From: "Jon Aquilina"
>> this is slightly off topic but im just wondering why spend
>> thousands of
>> dollars when u can just setup another server and backup
>> everything to a
>> raided hard drive array?
>>>>>> Another RAID system helps but only if it is located somewhere else.
>> The main reason we backup is for disaster recovery. One nice thing
>> about tape is that you can take the tapes to another location easily
>> or put them in a fire safe.
>>>> Another reason is that RAID systems don't scale up as easily as a
>> tape system. Our library has two 15 tape magazines that can be
>> removed and replaced. It costs about $750 to buy 15 new tapes plus a
>> magazine. That's not too bad for 6 TB of storage (uncompressed, with
>> HW compression we get about 9 TB). Plus it takes practically no time
>> to start using it.
>>>> The library wasn't really that expensive when we bought it either.
>> Somewhere around $7500. At the time we bought that we were using 400
>> GB drives in our RAID systems at $300 each. To build a server with 5
>> TiB (usable) of RAID storage at the time was about $7000. The tapes
>> were more expensive then (about $100 each) but for about $10,500 we
>> got 12 TB of tape storage (library plus 30 tapes). To get roughly
>> the same of disk storage would have been about $14K. So right off
>> the bat tape was cheaper. Plus it is so much easier to manage. I
>> like the idea of snapshots and using rsync plus links is a crafty
>> idea but I sleep better knowing that I have a "real" (one that I can
>> carry around) backup of our data in our safe.
>>>> Steve
>>>>>>>>>> --
>> Jonathan Aquilina
>>>>>> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>>>> _______________________________________________
>> Beowulf mailing list, Beowulf at beowulf.org>> To change your subscription (digest mode or unsubscribe) visit
>>http://www.beowulf.org/mailman/listinfo/beowulf>>>> --
> Gerry Creager -- gerry.creager at tamu.edu> Texas Mesonet -- AATLT, Texas A&M University
> Cell: 979.229.5301 Office: 979.458.4020 FAX: 979.862.3983
> Office: 1700 Research Parkway Ste 160, TAMU, College Station, TX 77843
>
--
Jonathan Aquilina
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